Paul
Harvey. Freedom’s Coming: Religious
Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil
Rights Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Xviii,
338 pp. ISBN: 0-8078-2901-3. Reviewed by Bland Whitley for the Journal of Southern Religion.

At what point does religious faith become politics
by other means? When does its deployment in a political arena constitute a
perversion of its core messages? When, alternatively, might its political
deployment represent a logical extension of its mission? I cannot contend that
these questions guided Paul Harvey’s fine history of the interplay between
evangelical Christianity and the South’s white supremacist political culture,
but they are worth keeping in mind when reading it. Harvey has set for himself
an ambitious goal of integrating the ways that faith helped the majority of
white evangelicals sustain Jim Crow with the ways that faith helped black
evangelicals undermine the South’s discriminatory structure. Encompassing as it
does so many varieties of evangelicalism, Harvey’s history shows a good deal of
narrative strain, but ultimately it succeeds in offering trenchant analyses of
a fascinating assortment of evangelical movements and individuals.

Harvey divides his account into five
chapters, the first two of which take a chronological approach, rushing the
reader through some one hundred years of southern religious history, while the
last three take more thematic approaches. Throughout, Harvey foregrounds the
three topics that bind his disparate stories together: theological racism,
racial interchange, and Christian interracialism. While the first and last of
these topics are fundamentally political in nature, covering efforts to justify
Jim Crow as well as efforts to forge a more just society, the second signifies
a realm of cultural practice.

Harvey begins with a discussion of
why Reconstruction-era efforts to forge a biracial evangelical community
foundered on the postbellum ideologies and realities of segregation. Biracial
solutions to the spiritual and social problems confronting southerners after
the Civil War never emerged as much of a possibility. The unwelcome paternalism
of well-meaning whites (northern and southern), the racist resentment of
defeated southern whites, and the desire among African Americans to take charge
of their own religious institutions worked together to encourage the rapid
consolidation of religious segregation. By the 1880s most southern white
evangelicals had combined the overthrow of Reconstruction with a sense of
spiritual triumphalism and thereby determined that God’s plan for the South was
a segregated, unequal society. Unable to overturn this political reality, black
evangelicals sought solace in the many enduring religious institutions they had
created in the immediate postbellum era and in hesitant interrogations of their
would-be Christian brothers in the white evangelical community.

"Harvey has absorbed a tremendous amount of historical material and displays throughout a knack for selecting interesting examples."

Harvey’s account of the peripatetic
efforts of some southern evangelicals to challenge segregation is necessarily
episodic, drawn from a wide range of secondary and primary sources. Indeed, one
sometimes gets the impression that Harvey cast as wide and as fine a scholarly
net as possible in the hopes of catching every last example of Christian
interracialism. Most of the profiles are evocative—Harvey has absorbed a
tremendous amount of historical material and displays throughout a knack for
selecting interesting examples. Most compelling is Harvey’s focus on women's
groups, both black and white, who acted as a kind of vanguard in applying
evangelical principles to improving society. While their male counterparts were
largely paralyzed by a commitment to the institutional status quo and, in the
case of whites, by their illiberal notions of race, women pioneered ecumenical
and increasingly biracial efforts to infuse southern society with positive
evangelical values. In the South the social gospel seems to have flourished
only among women’s groups, who increasingly shifted away from evangelicalism’s
traditional emphasis on individual amelioration and toward more sociological
understandings of the problems they hoped to solve.

The third chapter centers on the
expressive styles of the Holiness-Pentecostal movement. What affect, Harvey
asks, did the biracial cultural borrowing, which characterized holiness
adherents, have on the culture of segregation? To his credit he does not assume
that cultural biracialism necessarily signaled a rejection of the prevailing
social structure. Depending on the circumstance, the explosive worship styles
of the movement could subvert, reinforce, or parody segregation, sometimes
simultaneously. Perhaps, Harvey suggests, the most that can be said
definitively about the evangelical theater of the movement was that it provided
a cultural space where blacks and whites could mingle and learn from each
other, if only briefly. Even after Holiness and Pentecostal denominations
increasingly hardened behind racial lines, the cultural forms they continued to
create and that became increasingly prominent in the wider regional culture
encouraged interracial sharing. In making this case, Harvey synthesizes a wide
range of material on southern music, providing links between early Pentecostal
services and the biracial creativity of artists such as Ray Charles and Elvis
Presley.

What impact did the racial
interchange at the heart of southern religious folk culture and its emergence
into the wider American popular culture ultimately have on Jim Crow as a social
system? One might expect Harvey to posit his analysis of racial interchange as
a narrative bridge between the hardened racial lines and halting efforts to
soften such lines on one side and the civil rights movement on the other side.
He offers no such connection, however. His chapter on the movement bears few
traces of the previous cultural analysis. Instead, he offers an account that
identifies evangelical faith as the glue of the movement, which at one point he
characterizes as a kind of “religious crusade” centered on “Christian
interracialism” (171-72). Using a similar structure to that of chapter 2,
Harvey explores a wide range of figures from the movement and their
relationships with evangelical faith.

Harvey brings his account up to the
present in his last chapter, an incisive account of the growth of what is now
known as the Christian right. The collapse of Biblical defenses of segregation
in the face of the “moral force of the civil rights movement” (221) was not
altogether surprising. Although less than energetic in their opposition to
racism, white denominational leaders largely assented to a new ethical and
moral standard for race relations in the South. White evangelicals disappointed
by their leaders’ capitulation to liberalism did not attempt to sustain the
“folk theology of Christian racism,” but they did draw a harder line against
other manifestations of liberal belief. Harvey’s deft analysis shows how the
new breed of conservative Christian activists shifted the
traditionalist-modernist debate from the terrain of race to that of gender, where
it remains to this day.

One can only marvel at the sheer
volume of material, both secondary and primary, that Harvey has synthesized.
The institutional growth of African-American denominations, the religious
justification of white supremacy, black folk theology, the emergence of the
Holiness-Pentecostal movement, fundamentalism, the ecumenical social gospel
movement, and, of course, civil rights are just some of the many themes that
Harvey explores. Evocative profiles and trenchant analyses are laced throughout
the book, which continues his laudable project of discussing southern
evangelical faith as a biracial cultural phenomenon.

Still, readers may end up thirsting
for more explicit arguments. Freedom’s
Coming is full of themes but lacks an overarching theme (other than the
loose tie of biracialism). Given the wide varieties of southern evangelicalism,
perhaps this authorial strategy was wise—certainly making narrative sense of a
faith tradition that can sustain the most retrograde and violent social practices
while also promoting spiritual and at times political egalitarianism poses
extraordinary difficulties. Yet too often the work seems like a collection of
snippets, almost all interesting and important but tied together only by their
shared evangelical character. This tendency is most pronounced in the chapter
on the civil rights movement. Harvey succeeds in showing how faith infused the
beliefs and actions of participants in the movement, but he makes no effort to
assess evangelicalism’s relative importance. It is one thing to point
selectively to religion’s role in the individual cases that fill the book’s
portrait, yet another thing to use such cases as a collective indication of
religion’s centrality to the movement. Without a more explicit engagement with
other aspects of the movement (political liberalism, economic progressivism,
and popular culture come to mind), which might have allowed some tentative
assessments of religion’s relative significance, the chapter’s argument might
uncharitably be phrased, “evangelical faith was important to many people
involved in the civil rights movement.” Too much of the work as a whole shares
this tendency. It remains a mystery, at least in this reviewer's mind, what
might connect the cultural biracialism inherent to the Holiness-Pentecostal
movement with the social gospel liberalism that provided much of the impetus
for overturning the region's white supremacist political culture. Why have the
most culturally radical (and in many respects popular) modes of religious
expression generally been attached to other-worldly, pre-millennial beliefs?
Why have social gospelers embraced a clinical outlook drained of all religious
fervor and vulnerable to attacks from religious traditionalists? The civil
rights movement bridged this gap more successfully than most efforts to improve
the region, but it is less than clear that such a link was central to the
movement.

Questions such as these arise
throughout the book. Lest I sound overly critical and unappreciative, I want to
emphasize that Freedom's Coming demands a close reading from anyone interested in southern and American
history. Not only will students gain exposure to the rich and varied history of
southern evangelical religion and its central place in the culture of the
region, but they will undoubtedly form questions out of the material. Harvey’s
reluctance to connect dots may at times be frustrating, but his analyses and
profiles should engender many fruitful discussions. By offering so
comprehensive an account of evangelical faith and its cultural and political
interaction with the problem of racism, Harvey makes it impossible for scholars
of the South to ignore religion. It is an achievement that all should cheer.